What are some economically important applications of machine learning?

Question

Apologies in advance if this is too vague.

My list so far:

• statistical arbitrage
• actuarial science
• manufacturing process control
• image processing (security, manufacturing, medical imaging)
• computational biology/drug design
• sabermetrics
• yield management
• operations research/logistics (I'll include business intelligence with this)
• marketing (preference prediction, survey design/analysis, online ad serving)
• computational linguistics (Google, information retrieval, ...)
• educational testing
• epidemiology
• criminology (fraud detection, counterterrorism, ...)
• consumer credit scoring
• spam detection
• bug finding, virus detection, computer security

Are there any articles, books or journals that address this question? The only book I've seen is Supercrunchers, which focuses on consumer preferences an not much else.

Answer 1

There are a ton of fields which utilize machine learning:

• Predictive text input (Support Vector Machines)
• Computer Vision
• Game A.I.
• Robotic perception (classification and detection)
• Genomics
• Handwriting recognition (the U.S. Postal service uses neural networks for mail sorting, for instance)
• Credit card fraud detection
• Localization (Kalman filters, particle filters)
• Preference Prediction (Netflix, Amazon)

EDIT:

If you're looking to laundry list all the applications of machine learning, I think you'll find the problem is intractable. Machine learning as a field is largely focused on the task of using data to build a model which can map inputs to a desired set of outputs. The fields which utilize it grows constantly, as folks imagine new applications for machine learning. If it helps, typically machine learning is most powerful when the mapping between inputs and outputs cannot be well described, the mapping space is too highly dimensional to process in a reasonable fashion, and/or needs to be adaptive over time.

If you're simply looking for places to read up on machine learning applications, you can take a look at the following:

• Russel and Norvig's Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the standard text book for all things A.I.
• Journal of Machine Learning Research
• International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications

Another good bet would be to hit up university websites that have strong A.I., CS, Math, or Robotics programs and see if they have course materials of interest. I know, for instance, that CMU, MIT, and Stanford all typically have lots of course notes online which will often mention applications for various techniques.

Answer 2

Some hedge funds (like Renaissance Technologies) use various machine learning techniques to create black box trading algorithms. The ones that do it well basically print money.

In general, some of the more sophisticated arbitrage / risk management technologies use various degrees of machine learning and spend quite a bit of money writing that kind of software.